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THE SUN RISES IN THE EVENING

Chapter 6: This is How it Comes

Question 3

 

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The third question:
Question 3
THE MORE I LOOK INTO MYSELF, THE MORE I FIND THAT I'M SUCH A NARCISSIST -- AND MY ONLY AND REAL CONCERN IS NOT ENLIGHTENMENT, LIBERATION... AND ALL THAT, BUT BEAUTY. I WANT TO MAKE MYSELF AND THE WORLD AS BEAUTIFUL AS POSSIBLE. AND THE BEAUTY OF BEAUTIES SEEMS NOT TO BE. AM I AN OKAY STUDENT OF YOUR AESTHETICS?
Yes, Prabuddha, that's what others have called enlightenment, liberation, MOKSHA. Not to be is the n10st beautiful thing. To be is to be limited, and all limitations have ugliness. Limitation is ugliness; it is poor, it is poverty. Not to be means unlimited, infinite: it is richness, it is superabundance.
And remember, these three centres have always been the centres of religions: SATYAM, SHIVAM, SUNDERAM. SATYAM means truth, SHIVAM means good, SUNDERAM means beauty.
There are religions which have been centred on the concept of truth. There are religions which are centred on the concept of good. And there have to be religions now which will be centred on the concept of beauty -- and beauty is the highest. SATYAM is the first centre, SHIVAM IS the second, SUNDERAM is the third and the highest.
Truth is the first, the lowest. You will be surprised that truth is the lowest step. Why? Because truth is a logical concept -- dry, heady; it smells of logic-chopping. Truth makes a person dry, desertlike, and the religions which have depended on truth have become very very dry. Jainism is very dry; the Jaina scriptures look more like books of mathematics, logic -- you will not find any oasis there, it is all desert -- as if the idea of beauty had not been heard of at all.
The second step, a little better, is that of good. It is not only a question of a logical confusion, but of living it. It is not only philosophy, but life. The West has not got rid of the first step yet. The Greek mind was very much rooted in the idea of truth, and the Western mind has remained rooted there, it has not moved from there. All Western philosophies think of truth, and naturally they become just logic-chopping, argumentative. In the West the philosopher need not live his truth; all that is needed is that he should be consistent in his statements, not that he should be consistent in his life.
There was a philosopher in Greece who lived long, he lived for ninety years, and he was teaching suicide and telling people that suicide is the only logical thing to do. This was possible in Greece because you don't ask the philosopher to live it himself, all that you require of him is that whatsoever he says he should prove logically. And he was proving it logically; it is very simple to prove that life is meaningless, what else can be more simple? To prove that life has any meaning is almost impossible. To prove that life is meaningless is obvious. But when the philosopher had become very old and was on his death-bed, somebody asked 'Sir, you lived a really long life, and your whole life you have been teaching that suicide is the right, logical conclusion. Why didn't you commit suicide?' He said 'How could I, because I had to teach my philosophy, I had to spread my message? How could I? If I could live a little longer I would try to live a little longer, because the message, the word, has to be spread.'
In India religions have centred around the second concept: good. In India this is a basic question: if somebody is saying something, the first thing that people ask is 'Are you living it?' Unless you give a proof by your life, it is all meaningless, it is all gibberish. If you say something, then live it. If you say God is, then live life as if God is. If you say bad karma, bad action, will bring bad consequences and you are caught doing some bad thing, you have refuted your philosophy, then nobody will listen to you. You may be as logical as possible, but nobody is going to follow you. Your life has to be consistent with your logic; what you say has to be lived. That is the second state.
Religions of the past have either been of the first or of the second. The third, the highest, stage is evolving: the religion of beauty. That's why I say the first is logical, the second is ethical, and the third is aesthetical. The third is nothing but aesthetics. The man who is trying to be good has to impose goodness on himself; he has to practise and cultivate it. Deep down there is a split, and that split will remain.
You think celibacy is good; logically you have arrived at the conclusion that celibacy is good, that sexuality is just a waste of life energy, and that it is stupid also, and that it is animal-like also, and that unless you transcend sexuality, you will not be able to transcend your body, because body is the body of sex. It consists of sex, it is made of sex cells; it has been produced through sex and it wants to reproduce through sex. The body is the field of sex. Just as the body you will never know the soul, the non-sexual part of you. Logically you arrive at the conclusion that celibacy is good. Now, what you are going to do? If you are a Greek, then this is enough, you have done all that you can do; you go on living in sexuality and you go on talking about celibacy. But if you are a Hindu, this is not enough; you start trying to be celibate. You impose patterns, you do exercises, you cultivate a certain structure around yourself so that celibacy is supported and sex is destroyed. This can be done: one can cultivate oneself, one can condition oneself so deeply that on the surface sex disappears. But what about the unconscious? What about the deeper stream of your life energies? Sex disappears there and contaminates your sources.
The third, the religion of beauty, will have a totally different grounding. It will not believe in cultivation, because cultivation brings hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is ugly. It will not believe in creating a character, because when you create a character it is never true character -- because it has not arisen out of your innermost sources, it has been put there from the outside; it is nothing but a conditioning. Hypnosis or auto-hypnosis -- but it has not bloomed in your being, it is not your fragrance; it is ugly.
To see a person who is boiling inside with anger and on the surface showing that he is a sage is the ugliest thing in the world because this duality, this schizophrenia, this split makes him continually struggle within himself. He is never at ease, never at rest -- he cannot be, he cannot afford to: if he rests, all that he has repressed will start raising its head. If he relaxes, immediately the character disappears, and whatsoever he has condemned as characterlessness takes possession of him. This type of man cannot even go for a holiday. He has to continuously guard himself: he becomes his own prisoner and his own jailer. His life is a life of misery.
That's why your so-called saints who live in the second kind of religion are so sad. You don't know their misery; their misery is far more than your misery. Your misery is superficial, their misery is very deep. Their misery is the constant fight with themselves. They have divided themselves in two: the controller and the controlled. And the fight is unending; sometimes one part will win and sometimes another part will win. And it will always remain inconclusive because both are you. It is like making your right hand fight with the left hand. You can go on... you will be exhausted by it, but there is going to be no conclusive victory. And it is all a game. You can give a little more energy to the right, and the right wins, and you can give a little more energy to the left, and the left wins. When you want the right to win, you make the left pretend to be weak; when you want to let the left win, you let the right pretend to be weak -- it is all pretension, it is all hypocrisy.
The first kind of religion creates heady people -- just verbal, logical. The second kind of religion creates people who are hypocrites -- divided, split, neurotic. The world has suffered from these two kinds of people too much.
In the third, there is a totally different perspective: the religion is of beauty. If the religion is of beauty, it cannot allow any split in you, because all beauty is organic beauty; it arises out of unity. One has to be one: no repression, no character, no morality -- that's what religion is. That's why Zen people go on saying there is no morality, no good, no bad, no paradise, no hell. You become afraid.
Many questions have come today that if there is no morality then what will happen? People will become very immoral. Do you think-they are moral now? Have your morality and the preaching of the ages helped in any Way? Somebody has asked 'There are murderers in the world, killers in the world; if there is no morality and morality is not taught, what will happen?'
And the morality has been here for ten thousand years or more. What has happened? Are there less murderers? Are they on the decrease? They are on the increase. And the morality has been here -- from Moses to Mahatma Gandhi. The morality has been here and the moral teachers have been here -- where is morality? There are more and more crimes every day. More and more gaols, more and more police arrangements, more and more armies are needed every day. And the morality has been there. Do you think it has helped? It has not helped; in fact, it has aggravated the situation. It has not helped people to become moral, it has only helped them to become hypocrites.
And the hypocrite is the most immoral person there is because he pretends one thing and he is something else. He has a face to show to people and a different reality hiding behind; he lives through masks. He lives in misery, and he creates misery around himself. He has destroyed the natural, the spontaneous, in man because he believes in cultivation, in civilizing. He believes that people should be forced to be good.
Now, there is no way to force anybody to be good. In fact, if you force anybody to be good, you are forcing him to be bad. If he has any guts, he will rebel against you. If he has any intelligence, he will react against you: he will become just the opposite of what you wanted him to be.
Your morality, and the religions that preach it, has only created rebellions in the world. It has created reactions in people; people have gone just to the opposite end. If a person has any strength, power, dignity, he will go against it because it is so humiliating to follow orders, to be obedient. Unless obedience comes from your inner being out Of love and trust, it is ugly. But when it comes from within your heart, it is not obedience at all, because you are not following anybody else, you are following yourself.
If you fall in love with Christ and then there is obedience, that is a totally different kind of thing. You are in love; it is coming out of love. Christ is not forcing it on you, he is not saying 'I)o this, and if you don't you will suffer in hell'; he is not manipulating you. He loves you, and whatsoever he has gained, attained, whatsoever he has known, experienced, he shares with you. It is for you to choose or not to choose.
That's what I am doing here. No morality is taught here. No character is imposed here. I simply share my joy with you. If that joy becomes infectious, if you start feeling enchanted by it, you are attracted by it, it becomes a magnetic force in you and you start living it, that is your business. You have chosen it; nobody was in any way manipulating you.
When your life blooms from your sources, it is beautiful, it has beauty, SUNDERAM, it is aesthetic. Then there is no possibility of hypocrisy.
The world has become too false because of the moral teachings -- that falsity has to be taken away. I said to you that if you have any guts you will rebel against all commandments. A true Master cannot command. His presence commands -- that is a totally different thing -- but he never commands directly, he will never give you things like the Ten Commandments. He gives his love, and out of love things start happening.
Love is such a potential force.
And there are people who are weak, who have no guts, and there are people who are mediocre -- they will not rebel, they will yield to the pressure of the society, the preacher, the priest, the religion, the church. They will yield; in their yielding they will be cowards, by yielding they will become even more cowardly, in their yielding they will become ugly. Just see the point: if you yield out of fear you become ugly, because how can fear be beautiful? And if you rebel you become angry, and how can anger be beautiful? In both ways the preachings of the moralists and the puritans have been destructive to humanity.
No more of it! The future belongs to a totally different quality of religion. Zen is just a herald -- much more will be coming -- it is just the first ray, a first insight. People need not be in anger, and people need not live out of fear. People have to live out of their natural, spontaneous being. People have to be themselves, then there is beauty.
Why are the trees so beautiful? Have you ever seen an ugly tree? You will be surprised, ponder over it -- have you ever seen an ugly tree? Have you ever seen an ugly peacock or an ugly dove or an ugly dear? Have you ever seen an ugly tiger? Then why do you come across ugly men and ugly women? Why? Something has gone wrong with man, something has been done to man's naturalness.
The whole of nature is beautiful, because it is natural, because there are no priests and no churches and no moralists going around teaching trees to be of character, to be good; teaching birds to be this way or that; giving disciplines and commandments. Man has to come back to his innocence. That is the message of Zen.
You say, Prabuddha: THE MORE I LOOK INTO MYSELF THE MORE I FIND THAT I'M SUCH A NARCISSIST. MY ONLY AND REAL CONCERN IS NOT ENLIGHTENMENT, LIBERATION... AND ALL THAT, BUT BEAUTY.
But that's what enlightenment is. You are not a narcissist. Don't use such words because they can become condemnatory, and once a condemnation enters in your being you start becoming ugly. Don't label yourself, and don't be labelled by others. Remain free of labels because labels are dangerous: once you use a certain word about yourself, you tend to think that you are that. Avoid words and look into reality. Now, to use the word 'narcissist' is dangerous: you have already condemned yourself, you have already accepted that something is wrong with you. Once you accept that something is wrong with you, you cannot be at ease with yourself.
Nothing is wrong. And this concern for beauty is concern for enlightenment. Enlightenment makes people beautiful. Have you ever conceived of any person more beautiful than Buddha or Yoka or Bodhidharma or Huineng? Just think of Buddha for a moment. Such beauty has never walked on the earth, such grace...
H. G. Wells used to say that Buddha is the greatest godless man of human history, and the most godly. And he is true: the most godless and the most godly. Never has such a beauty walked, never has such a beauty been found residing in any body. From where did it come? It came from his enlightenment -- from his insight that all is good; from his insight that there is no need to go anywhere, all is here; from his insight that one has to drop all longing for truth, meaning, God. That longing makes one ugly, that longing makes one tense, that longing creates anguish. That insight happened, and he became a God -- immediately he became a God. Then there was infinite beauty, then there was splendour. Then he became part of the trees and the birds and the mountains and the stars and the rivers. He became again natural, he became again innocent.
You say: I WANT TO MAKE MYSELF AND THE WORLD AS BEAUTIFUL AS POSSIBLE.
Now, beauty is not a thing that you can do anything about. If you start doing anything about it, you will make it ugly -- that's how the world has become so ugly. Don't try to make the world beautiful. And don't try to make yourself beautiful, because if you try to make yourself beautiful that beauty will be false. What will you do? Will you search for cosmetics? beautiful clothes? Is it going to help? You can have a certain cut of hair, you can have beautifully manufactured clothes, you can have a beautiful house decorated aesthetically, but is it going to make you beautiful? Is it going to help you in any way?
Beauty is not of the outside, beauty is of the inner; it is within you. Let me remind you again. Martin Heidegger is right when he says it is a releasement; it has to be released. You have to open up, and the fragrance will be released. You are a bud, and you have to become a flower, that's all. Don't think in terms of making the world beautiful, otherwise you will become a missionary -- and a missionary is one of the ugliest things in the world. And don't think of making yourself beautiful. It is not a question of making or doing at all, it is a question of being.
Be. In your stillness, in your silence, in your meditativeness -- when you simply are -- there and only there is beauty. In that ecstasy of simple being, of pure being, is beauty. In that silence, beauty takes form. The song becomes audible, the form becomes visible, the unknown becomes known.
Don't say that you are not interested in enlightenment, because if you are not interested in enlightenment, you will never be beautiful. Watch the words that you use, because words have become very very important; people live by them, and according to them.
Beauty is there -- that is the persistent message of Zen -- release it. You are not to become beautiful, you are beautiful; all that is needed is to remove the rocks. Who is hindering the path? This constant chattering in the mind makes you a cripple. This constant effort to be something: to be more rich, lo be more beautiful, to be more enlightened -- this constant search for more makes you ugly, makes you greedy. Forget about 'more'. Enjoy that which you have. In that contentment is beauty; that contentment is beauty. Enjoy that which is available; don't hanker for that which is not available. Mind is always hankering for that which you don't have, and mind is never interested in that which you have. And you can enjoy only that which you have. Nobody can enjoy that which one does not have.
Now, look at the dilemma. Mind always says 'Have that because that is beautiful. To be there will be good, it will be great, fantastic.' But when you reach there, the mind has already moved ahead. Now it says 'Go there. That woman is beautiful, not this.' 'That' is always beautiful 'this' is never beautiful -- always that, the faraway, the distant, the unavailable. Search for it. By the time you arrive there, you are finished. The mind has no interest in that which is. It starts hankering again for something more, something else. Mind keeps you in constant misery, constant discontent, in a feverish state, hungry, thirsty -- and for no reason at all. And you have all that can give you contentment. You have all that can make you supersaturated.
Be here. Enjoy this moment, and all that is contained in this moment. And suddenly you will find that beauty is released. And not only you will find that beauty is released, others will become aware that something has happened, something has happened in the deepest being of this man because the man has become luminous, transparent. Even an ordinary homely face becomes utterly beautiful when there is silence inside. And even a very very shapely face becomes ugly when there is only anxiety and anguish and anger and frustration inside, because the face continuously shows that which is hidden in you, your eyes go on reflecting that which is in your heart.
Be still, and be beautiful -- there is no other way.


 

Next: Chapter 6: This is How it Comes, Question 4

 


Energy Enhancement             Enlightened Texts             Zen            The Sun Rises in the Evening

 

 

Chapter 6:

 

 

 

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